Now Diego Velazquez had all his life been sowing dragons’ teeth, and hunting witches, and building guillotines, and brazen bulls. Starting from Spain in the guise of a noble old soldier, as he advertised himself, though some said of him that his sword was bloodless and his bravery bravado, he served the usual apprenticeship in the New World, chasing, and mutilating, and murdering, and enslaving natives, working to death on his plantations those saved for this most cruel fate. For this and similar service Diego Colon, then ruling the Indies at Española, sent him to Cuba to play governor there over those inoffensive and thrice unlucky savages. Fraud being native to his character, no sooner was he fairly seated than he repudiated his late master and benefactor, and reported directly to the king, even as his own captain of the Mexican expedition was now doing. Another of his guillotines was the vile treatment of Grijalva for not disobeying orders, on which score he could not complain against Grijalva’s successor. Yet, as head and heart frosted with time the Cuban governor was not happy: misdeeds never bring true or lasting happiness. His bitterness, however, was but in the bloom; the full fruit of his folly would come only after the consummation of events upon the continent, grand as yet beyond conception. Ordinarily it is much easier to kill a man than to create one; in this instance it was extremely difficult to kill the man that he had made. If among the New World cavaliers such a thing as poltroon or coward could be, Diego Velazquez was that thing, notwithstanding he had participated in so much fighting. Yet I do not call him coward, for my pen refuses to couple such a term with that of sixteenth-century Spaniard. Certain it is, however, that few men in those days preferred conquering new lands by deputy to winning glory in person, and if this soldier and governor was not a coward, there was little of the manly or chivalrous in his bravery. He was cautious, yet frequently his cupidity overcame his caution; and when he adventured his gold—for he seldom risked his life, either for fame which he dearly loved, or for gold which he loved still dearer—it was under restrictions ruinous to almost any enterprise. In his ordinary mood he played fairly enough the statesman and hero, but in truth his statesmanship was superficial, and his heroism theatrical. Las Casas calls him a terrible fellow for those who served him, and Gomara says he had little stomach for expenditures. This much allowance, however, should be made in any statements of historians respecting the governor of Cuba: in their drama of the conquest Diego Velazquez plays the part of chief villain to the hero Hernan Cortés, when as a matter of fact Cortés was the greater villain of the two, principally because he was the stronger.